16Dec2004

Remember how the GRINCH stole Christmas? Well this year it’s the Green’s turn. Dear old Mike Ward, Green List MP who hails from Nelson, wants all of us to refrain from buying Christmas presents for our loved ones this year. Instead he’s suggesting that we do the dishes and make a hackey-sac. Great ideas. Most modern men or women for that matter wouldn’t have a clue of how to fill a sink let alone wash a dish. If the Creator meant mankind to wash dishes why on earth did He allow the Fisher & Paykel twin drawer dishwasher to be created? And what about the hackey-sac. They’re those little embroidered bits of fabric filled with birdseed or similar material that young men who have nothing better to do, gather in public places and start kicking one of these hackey-sacs aimlessly to one another. Apparently Mike’s got the whole of the Green Party caucus hackey-sacing in their caucus room every Monday morning. I understand these sessions apparently stimulate and release endorphins in the brain. Green Party members come out of these sessions with some hackey–sackey-wackey ideas and theories. Like Sue Kedgley’s latest. She’s gone off crated pigs and battery hens and moved on to strawberries. When she announced earlier this week that the eating of strawberries could be responsible for blowing an 8.16 sq. km hole in the ozone layer I became worried. I know cows and sheep because of the rich grass they eat have been labelled as the culprits for the emission of deleterious gases into the atmosphere creating great black holes everywhere. But what I didn’t know was that the consumption of strawberries could have the same effect. I knew that onions, baked beans and broccoli can play havoc with one’s intestinal tract but surely not the Christmas strawberry. But I’d misread Ms Kedgley. It wasn’t the gas emitted after eating the strawberries that was the cause of the ozone depletion. In fact a clinical study conducted by Otago Medical School on 200 subjects who had eaten the equivalent of three punnets of strawberries each over a three day period revealed little or no gaseous emissions. No the damage was being caused prior to the eating. Crops of strawberries were being sprayed with methyl bromide, which said Sue is one of the most highly toxic and ozone depleting gasses known to man and in Green terminology woman too. But the growers tell us that if we don’t spray the strawberries with methyl bromide there won’t be any strawberries. I had to concede Sue might have a point. I wondered however how she measured the size of the hole 8.16 sq. km rather than the possibility that the hole might only be 5.42 sq. km. When I suggested to her that my mother used to sprinkle her strawberries with icing sugar could that help? “No, the damage would already have been done”. Surely all the Christmas strawberries will have been sprayed by now. The big hole is already there. How is the boycotting of this year’s Christmas punnet going to help the situation? “Aren’t you a bit late? Shouldn’t you have been alerting us to this back in the early spring?” She looked at me with those big beautiful brown sad Betty Davis eyes. “In hindsight yes I should have”. I think I sensed a nascent tear welling up in one of those eyes. Or was it just condensation brought on by global warming. Slowly she turned, took a hackey-sac – a Christmas gift from Mike Ward – from her Louis Vuitton handbag and started kicking it aimlessly in the air. I think she was giving me the proverbial raspberry.

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A final thought. You’ve read of the distasteful Nativity scene created at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks. Victoria Beckham depicted as Mary and David Beckham as Joseph. Well I can assure you Beckham is no Joseph. There would be no way that Joseph if he’d been playing for England against Portugal in the World Cup would have missed that crucial penalty as Beckham did.
Happy Christmas to you all. See you sometime in the New Year. Strawberries and the Editor willing.

09Dec2004

When it was reported last week that university graduates on Work & Income skill courses were being asked to draw a pig as part of a personality test and spend thirty minutes practising handshakes many thought that the whole thing was a hoax. Well it wasn’t. In fact the test went further than that. Some graduates were given sacks full of square pegs and were then asked to try and fit them into an office quadrangle lawn pocked with round holes. Then there were the egg and spoon or three-legged sack races but I don’t want to refer to them. Let’s talk about the pigs. The job seekers were handed a sheet of pink paper and a pen and told to draw a pig. How and where on the paper they drew the pig was analysed and from this analysis a candidate’s personality was able to be assessed. The drawing unleashed such secrets as a candidate’s analytical skills, ability to socialize, empathize and if necessary cauterize. I’d come across similar tests myself. They always seemed to involve animals. At one of my first job interview years ago I was left alone in a brightly lit room given a paper tail and asked to pin it on a large cardboard cutout of a donkey which was hanging on the wall. This you will readily recognise was a variation on the old party game for young kids “pin the tail on the donkey”. You remember how you were blindfolded, turned around a couple of times, then you made a stab at the wall where you thought the donkey’s tail should be. If you were successful of pinning the tail within one metre of the donkey’s hindquarters you were usually rewarded with a bag of jellybeans or some similar confectionery. It was pretty much the same at my job interview. Except I wasn’t blindfolded. And there were no jellybeans. The donkey was as large as life in front of me. Because there was no blindfold I realised that I had been set a trap. Employment psychologists work this way. So I promptly pinned the tail on the donkey’s nose. Well I came out with flying colours. The psychologist’s remarks relating to this test said that I had shown initiative formed with a considerable degree of lateral thinking but above all a real urge to push the boundaries and go outside the square. To this day I have difficulty looking donkeys in the eye without thinking that their tails are in the wrong place.

So why did the WINZ people choose a pig rather than a donkey? It’s a physiological fact that the intestinal tract of a pig, in fact any of the pig’s internal organs are almost identical to ours. There’s a great deal of similarity between pigs and humans. Perhaps this is best bought out by the analogy of pigs in the trough and politicians feeding on the public purse. So how were the drawings assessed? If you drew your pig at the top of the page you’re an optimist. At the bottom a pessimist. Four legs showed that you were secure and stubborn. Less than four revealed pathetic insecurities. The bigger the ears the better listener you are.

The Wellington Regional Commissioner for Work and Income said that the test was used as an “ice-breaker”. “I don’t know how scientific it is but it’s a test used by many companies”. Sounded to me like buying a pig with a poke. “What about this handshake ritual?” “We at Work and Income put a lot of stead into handshakes. In fact most of the deals we conclude with our clients are done on a simple handshake. I know we’re a bit old fashioned in that regard but to us a handshake is everything. I know high flyers and the cursory slap and hug like you get after a game of rugby are in vogue but there’s nothing to beat the firm grasping of the hand, the direct eye contact and in particular not wiping your hand after that contact.”

If this summer you come across unemployed students sitting on the pavement drawing pigs with pink chalk and wanting to shake your hand treat them with sympathy rather than disdain. They’re not on pot. They’re just failures of the Work and Income test.